The Fall Into Strategy series is both a play on the season and a metaphor for how we convert intention into action with a plan, by design. Today, we look at the bigger picture of complexity and its role in strategic design.
More specifically, we’re going to look at three words: fumbling, stumbling, and forward.
Strategic Design and Complexity: A Short Introduction
Strategic design is about intentional change and adaptation with purpose. It’s fundamentally attuned to complexity. As noted in one of my earlier posts on strategic design from our summer series:
Strategic design represents a fundamental shift from traditional planning approaches to an adaptive methodology that embraces complexity—the unpredictable outcomes arising from interconnected systems that can’t be reversed once they evolve—as a navigable reality requiring pattern recognition over problem-solving.
This means a few things. First, there’s no going back. Regardless of what you think about the past, it’s gone. We cannot, no matter what we try, return to it. That’s complexity. The state (the system) is changed. We can create patterns and similar aspects of what we had, but they will be anew within the context of the present.
It sounds simple enough, but truly embracing this in a strategic context is often a challenge for people. They incorrectly apply concepts of ‘best practice’ to strategy, aiming to replicate what happened before. They mistakenly identify their conditions as complicated or simple, rather than complex.
There are lessons we can learn. We’re not creating everything from scratch each time, but there has to be an understanding that we are putting our intentions and plans into a different world: economic, social, and environmental. Yet, we can still design for this difference. It’s not that we have to abandon planning; it’s that we have to plan differently. That’s what strategic design is all about.
Complexity is not the absence of linearity, rather it’s the presence of non-linearity and emergence. There are still cause and effect relationships within a complex system, however, the system itself isn’t governed by such characteristics. Further, those relationships are embedded within a context where there are many other non-linear relations.
Strategy is about setting a design for getting from here to there. That means there is an element of forward motion — directionality — to what we do. In order to shape systems with intent, we have to be able to count on some measure of cause and effect (or, as I prefer to say — cause and influence).
Designing strategy for complexity-enriched conditions, means attending to many forces coming together in planned, unplanned, unpredictable. We do this by fumbling our way through, stumbling often, while still moving forward.
Fumbling
Consider the scenario of you and your friend going camping. You wake in the middle of the night to get some water that’s stored out of your tent. It’s dark in the tent and only partly illuminated outside. You’re in a strange, unfamiliar place that you settled on for the night. You don’t want to wake your friend, who’s sound asleep. You might remember in general what configuration of the campsite is like, where the packs are, where your flashlight is, and the way the clasps work on the tent to get in and out in a way that’s quiet.
Your job is to navigate around the tent, then the campsite, find the water, drink and return to your sleeping back all without stubbing your toe on the rocks, tripping over your bags, or spilling water over the place. You’re fumbling around based on memory, sensing, and feedback.
That’s strategy in complexity. If you’re careful, you can do this. It might take much longer than it would if you had light, were familiar with the space, and didn’t have to worry about waking someone else up, but you can do it. With practice, you can do it quite well.
I used to learn how to get dressed in the dark (effectively! No mismatched colours!) based on fumbling when I had to leave for work trips early in the morning so as not to wake others in the house.
Stumbling Forward
Your next part of your camping trip is a hike. To use this metaphor with strategy, let’s consider that the pathway forward might be inconsistently cleared, filled with roots, uneven terrain, and the occasional fallen tree that needs to be traversed. These are the very qualities that make hiking (for some) enjoyable.
This might be where we have greater sightlines on what’s going on (we’ve gone beyond fumbling), but still have things emerge from our path.
Our ability to traverse this trail is dependent on us moving ahead.
Forward motion is where we encounter some of the linear aspects of non-linear conditions. We are still moving down a pathway. It’s not a straight line. It’s not even terrain. It might also require that we occasionally need to stop and start, double-back, and pause. Yet, the movement is intentional in a direction. We’re not letting the environment push us wherever the forces move us (like floating in the water), we are directional and intentional and moving.
But, we also must pay attention to the path and be sensitive to the conditions around us. The best strategies are those that account for the trail, the context, and the goals we have all at once.
Our strategy works when we’ve set the plan and the destination and designed for the pathways and conditions to allow us to fumble, stumble and navigate our way through it. But, if we’ve designed it well, we will move forward.
We’ll look at how we do this, in our future.
Image Credits: Jonathan Rathgeb on Unsplash and Photo by 𝕡𝕒𝕨𝕤 𝕒𝕟𝕕 𝕡𝕣𝕚𝕟𝕥𝕤 on Unsplash